Please register to participate in our discussions with 2 million other members - it's free and quick! Some forums can only be seen by registered members. After you create your account, you'll be able to customize options and access all our 15,000 new posts/day with fewer ads.

What people are mostly saying is that any eastside suburb will have better schools than Seattle, or some of the northern suburbs.

Let's see. Garfield High School (Seattle) produced more National Merit Scholars than any other public high school in the state, although Newport (Bellevue) did make a good showing. Meanwhile, their jazz band took the national Essentially Ellington jazz competition and their classical orchestra is not half bad either.

What the Eastside suburbs have going for them is predominantly a very homogeneously affluent group of parents. This is not a bad thing per se. Children from families who have professional educations are more likely to do well in school than children from uneducated families. It's unfair, but that's the way of the world.

In the few pockets of poverty over on the Eastside (yes, they do exist), the Bellevue and Lake Washington school districts are no more capable of handling large influxes of poor children than their counterparts in Seattle.

While it's beyond dispute that the test scores on average in the Eastside schools are higher than their counterparts in Seattle, this says a lot more about the demographic makeup of the Eastside than the quality of the schools or their teachers themselves.

What people are mostly saying is that any eastside suburb will have better schools than Seattle, or some of the northern suburbs.

Let's see. Garfield High School (Seattle) produced more National Merit Scholars than any other public high school in the state, although Newport (Bellevue) did make a good showing. Meanwhile, their jazz band took the national Essentially Ellington jazz competition and their classical orchestra is not half bad either.

What the Eastside suburbs have going for them is predominantly a very homogeneously affluent group of parents. This is not a bad thing per se. Children from families who have professional educations are more likely to do well in school than children from uneducated families. It's unfair, but that's the way of the world.

In the few pockets of poverty over on the Eastside (yes, they do exist), the Bellevue and Lake Washington school districts are no more capable of handling large influxes of poor children than their counterparts in Seattle.

While it's beyond dispute that the test scores on average in the Eastside schools are higher than their counterparts in Seattle, this says a lot more about the demographic makeup of the Eastside than the quality of the schools or their teachers themselves.

So.... you're talking about ONE school that's essentially a magnet school with AP programs for especially gifted students. Which generally people do not fit in, except for those small few.

How is that any better than an entire SD that does well on the test, even for the average people?

I think the truth is somewhere in between. Garfield is the home of the only APP program in Seattle, so it has a very high concentration of "smarties" attending, who mostly don't have a whole lot of interaction with the larger group of regular kids who attend school downstairs at Garfield.
But by the same token, I know a couple of people who work for the Bellevue SD who aren't quite so gung ho on the district, and believe that at this point in time, Bellevue focuses a lot on "teaching to the test" to get those high test scores. I also agree with wumingzi that economics has a lot to do with it. Seattle has a much higher proportion of lower income students in it's public schools, and a much higher proportion of higher income students going to private schools than Bellevue does.
Certainly Seattle is not the worst of the large city public school systems, it's possible to get a good education there, and there are schools with happy kids that are learning and involved, active parents. There's just a lot of BS to navigate and a lot of hoops to jump through in order to ensure that.

Please register to post and access all features of our very popular forum. It is free and quick. Over $68,000 in prizes has already been given out to active posters on our forum. Additional giveaways are planned.

Detailed information about all U.S. cities, counties, and zip codes on our site: City-data.com.